Tutor: Riet Eeckhout
Academic year 2019-20
Engagement: Mediating Tactics
1st Master Studio Drawing Architecture I
WHAT?
In pursuit of drawing architecture, this studio critically looks at architecture as a figure on the ground relationship deeply entrenched in contextual site information. While we shed the burdens of Architecture as commodity formalised through programme, commercial and administrative site delineation, we investigate an architecture of expression and spatial articulation within durational experience (time).
For one semester, we dive into a spatial playing field based on instinctive site intelligence and intense site readings through the production of serial design drawings and filmic observations. And you will find that the performative nature of such a production process propels speculative instinct and design capabilities.
In this studio, we stretch the phase of site observation with film making, drawing and model making.
The studio will be structured around lectures and individual and group tutorials. A guided process based on observed figure – ground relationships and the point of view from which we look at these relationships, its spatial tectonic, impetus, formal articulation and spatial ambiance.
In this studio, we will search for and celebrate spatial opportunities and intensify these through design.
WHERE?
We will work in the harbour zone North of Ghent, more specifically in the sliver where two urban programs come together: the port Industry meets small scale residential. Both programs have their specific typology and spatial expression in their edifices and urban structure.
The uncanny ground that brings both the village and the port industry together is riddled with hidden trajectories, historical layers, textured old brick workman’s houses, meticulous industrial work rituals and workers body extensions as customised over-scaled machines and mechanic structures: a rich ground for spatial narrative, circumstantial form collisions and mutual benefits.
The exchange of forces between these opposites, their extreme functionality and customisation, could spark spatial turmoil in the no-mansland that sits in between.
We will wonder these streets and quays and scavenge opportunities we observe at either end of the scale. This extensive site reading will be an individual, obsessive endeavour giving rise to an un-common ground for the collision between the two unrelated functions.
Master program complementary with 2nd Master Studio Drawing Architecture II (Riet Eeckhout + Mira Sanders)
